The office ... make[s] its incumbent a repair man behind a dyke. No sooner is one leak plugged than it is necessary to dash over a...nd stop another that has broken out. There is no end to it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

The Grid makes the history of architecture and all previous lessons of urbanism irrelevant. It forces Manhattan's builders to deve...lop a new system of formal values, to invent strategies for the distinction of one block from another. The Grid's two-dimensional discipline also creates undreamt-of freedom for three-dimensional anarchy. The Grid defines a new balance between control and de-control in which the city can be at the same time ordered and fluid, a metropolis of rigid chaos.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Manhattan has no choice but the skyward extrusion of the Grid itself; only the Skyscraper offers business the wide-open spaces of ...a man-made Wild West, a frontier in the sky.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

In a universe that is all gradations of matter, from gross to fine to finer, so that we end up with everything we are composed of ...in a lattice, a grid, a mesh, a mist, where particles or movements so small we cannot observe them are held in a strict and accurate web, that is nevertheless nonexistent to the eyes we use for ordinary living--in this system of fine and finer, where then is the substance of a thought?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

He could jazz up the map-reading class by having a full-size color photograph of Betty Grable in a bathing suit, with a co- ordina...te grid system laid over it. The instructor could point to different parts of her and say, "Give me the co-ordinates."... The Major could see every unit in the Army using his idea.... Hot dog!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Chaucer sawed life in half and out tumbled hundreds of unpremeditated lives, because he didn't have the cast-iron grid of a priori... coherence that makes reading Goethe, Shakespeare, or Dante an exercise in searching for signs of life among the conventions, compulsions, self-justifications, proofs, wise saws, simple but powerful messages, and poetry.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

The hedge [of hawthorns] formed a type of suite of chapels disappearing under the wall of their flowers heaped as on an altar; und...er them, the sun placed on the ground a grid of light, as if it had come through a glass window; their fragrance was as smooth and as clearly defined in its form as if I had stood before the Virgin's altar, and the flowers, so ornamented, each distractedly held its dazzling bouquet of stamens, fine and shining ribs of flamboyant style like those which in the church line the ramp of the rood-screen or the mullions of stained-glass windows and which bloomed into the white flesh of strawberry blossoms.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Like the Roman town grid, the New York plan was laid down on largely empty land, a city designed in advance of being inhabited; if... the Romans consulted the heavens for guidance in this effort, the city fathers of New York consulted the banks.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »